Israel split over settlement retreat

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, will today seek approval by the Israeli parliament for parts of his plan to withdraw from Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank.

The Knesset will be asked to approve legislation on offering settlers compensation to leave their homes. On Tuesday members will vote on the disengagement plan itself. Sharon is expected to win all the votes he requires to begin disengagement, but Israel is approaching this week with a sense of major disquiet.

Last week the media was full of fears of an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister and his colleagues. Commentators also predicted that Jewish extremists would attack Palestinians or Muslim targets to unleash a wave of unrest that would destabilise the country and prevent the withdrawals.

Dozens of soldiers threatened to disobey orders and resign. Refusal to serve in the army is seen as a cardinal sin because the fate of the army is equated with the fate of the Jewish state.

The debate over disengagement has polarised Israelis. Between 60 and 70 per cent are in favour, while the remainder fiercely oppose it.

Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and sociology, said that many Israelis had an apocalyptic feeling about the dispute. 'I sometimes feel that the state of Israel is in the balance; then I remember the Afrikaners in South Africa. There were a lot of threats, but when the moment of truth arrived they did nothing and the majority won,' he said.

The two sides also represent very different ideas of Israel. The majority represent the secular founding principles of the Zionists, while the minority have combined religion and nationalism, a trend which began after Israel's 1967 conquest of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. On Friday there was a large gathering of secular Israelis at the Love Parade in Tel Aviv. Around 100,000 gay and straight people danced and drank all day. On Tuesday tens of thousands of settlers will demonstrate around the Knesset in Jerusalem.

The difference between the two groups could not be greater. 'The majority are western, secular, modern, future-orientated, while the settlers are fundamentalists who look back 2,000 years,' said Peri. 'They are xenophobic and anti-democratic. The minority is trying to push around the majority, which is weak and disorganised.'

What the settlers lack in numbers they make up for in motivation and organisation. Young settlers marry early and are happy to live in a mobile home in the West Bank and devote their life to advancing their political cause. Secular youth tend be politically uninterested.

'I asked some of my students why they were not doing anything,' Peri said. 'They said they were looking after their own interests. Many are getting European passports.

'One student told me that many years ago he asked his father if he would get a passport from the country where he was born - Germany. His father said, "Over my dead body". Two weeks ago he agreed to do it. The secular rational majority have their own solution to this crisis - we will go abroad.'

While Israel focuses on the disengagement plan, life in the Palestinian territories remains brutal. Kieran Prendergast, the UN under secretary-general for political affairs, said that 206 Palestinians and 13 Israelis had been killed in the last month.

'Violence, not negotiation, continues to be the all too frequent mode of communication in the Middle East,' he told the council on Friday. 'There is a sense of drift and foreboding; in the case of the occupied Palestinian territory, of drift towards chaos.'

Voices across the divide

DAVID GROSSMAN, novelist:

'It shows how extreme and dangerous our situation is, how we have become polarised, how the hatred for the enemy has filtered into the inner organs of our national system.

'What we are seeing is how the settlers have got used to the idea that the state serves as an instrument to realise their messianic hallucinations. They do not accept that the state and the majority wants to change the direction.

'I am almost sure the situation will become violent, though I hope reality will defy me. The settlers know the battle on Gaza is lost, but want to make the issue such a national trauma that it will be engraved on the Israeli psyche.'

YAEL DAYAN, member of the Knesset for left-wing Yahad party. Daughter of Moshe Dayan, Israel's defence minister in the 1967 Six Day War:

'There is an idea of a crisis, but it is not just about disengagement. It is whether or not we will move ourselves towards a peace process.

'A healthy democratic society should always be ready to end occupation and embrace peace. The talk of civil war frightens me less. If we are strong enough to fight a war, then we are certainly strong enough to fight for peace. We are not strong enough to compromise on our democracy and continue occupation. We do not have an answer to individual acts of fanatical terrorism.'

DAVID WILDER, Hebron settler:

'When the Peel Commission asked David Ben Gurion in 1937 why he had the right to live here, he showed them the Torah. That is the foundation of everything. People have lost faith and the result is this crisis.

'We have not come to terms with the fact that we are living in a sovereign state, in our own land. We have come back home and are independent and can make decisions for ourselves. They even question whether we have the right to this land and the right to defend ourselves

'Sharon might succeed in uprooting 8,500 people from their homes, but the height of the crisis might come in one year or 10 years.'